Maker Of Networking Solutions Expands

DPS Telecom, a networking monitoring company that started in Fresno 21 years ago and has grown steadily ever since, started another big expansion with a ground breaking on Thursday.

DPS, which has more than 500 clients throughout the country and provides turn-key network monitoring solutions, last expanded in 1998 when it moved to its current location near the Fresno-Yosemite International Airport. While the company plans to keep using its 17,000-square-foot building, it will move most of its production department to a new, 28,000-square-foot facility just next to it, said Eric Storm, one of the founders of DPS. The new building should be operating within 18 months. "What we plan on doing is moving our production facility from part of this building into the new building," he said. "It will give us more space for new equipment, and laying out the floor better, and the space that was vacated, we'll be expanding sales and engineering."

Storm said the company also plans to hire more employees to match the physical growth. He said he expects the staff to expand by 50 percent, which would be about 25 employees, and most of them will be in production.

DPS provides monitoring solutions to telecommunications companies, such as major long-distance carriers, utilities, transportation companies and even Fortune 500 companies. Every product they make is built to order. The company's strategy is to be vertically integrated, meaning all the parts of the units they sell are built in-house, except for a few parts.

DPS's monitoring systems allow managers of telecommunications sites to maintain the systems remotely and in many cases, in real time.

"Managers usually have to wait for the [network center] to notify them of alarms, even when the alarm is from equipment in the next room," Storm stated in a press release. "That's just unacceptable when you're responsible for a revenue-generating network."

"The whole point of what our equipment does is that there are a lot of types of failures you can have in the field, but if you know about them earlier, it doesn't have to mean outage," Storm said.

Most of DPS Telecom's clients have non-disclosure agreements, Storm said.

But he did say that the company's customer base has grown to 500 since 1986, when the company had only three workers. The company also has original equipment manufacturers as clients, who merge DPS products into their own packages.

"The lion's share [of customers] are national," he said. "It would be more likely to have a system in New York and Atlanta than in Fresno, but a good chunk is east of the Mississippi," he said.

While he declined to give specific revenue figures, Storm said that last year was a "record-breaking year" for the company's gross sales and gross production.

But growth is something the company is used to.

"We've always been growing," he said. "We've been... constantly growing, moving from office to office, and in 1998, we started the plans to build the building we are in now."